Toxic sofas linked to surge in thyroid cancer

The article makes the very valid point that a common brominated flame retardant, DecaBDE, is all but banned in Europe but still exists in millions of UK sofas in our homes right now. The Stockholm Convention is set to make the safe disposal of DecaBDE mandatory. This will be an expensive process. The furniture industry has known about this for some years but has not acted, crucially not warning consumers that they are sitting on an established toxic substance. Following this article, the British Furniture Confederation felt obliged to issue a press release. I comment on this on another page on this site: "The Lies of the British Furniture Confederation".

Following the Sunday Times article, I was contacted by a number of other journalists and the following papers ran similar stories:

1. There are many other flame retardants in our sofas besides DecaBDE. DecaBDE itself was replaced by the FR industry a few years back with a near-identical brominated flame retardant. This now sits in recent furniture and itself will no doubt be banned in time too.

2. The current match test - which is responsible for DecaBDE and other brominated flame retardants being present in our sofas - does not even work in most cases.